Deftones are on top of the world right now. They’re fresh off a tour that had them headlining Madison Square Garden–a much bigger NYC show than the one they played the last time they were here, just three years earlier–and they’re the only band from the original nu metal boom whose new album feels like an event simply because they’re embarking on a new album cycle. Private Music (stylized all-lowercase as private music on streaming services) isn’t a long-awaited reunion album or a big comeback or an album that comes with any narrative that didn’t already exist the last time Deftones released an album (2020’s great Ohms). It’s just a great album from an artist who we always expect to release great albums–like a Radiohead or a Björk, or perhaps most accurately, The Cure, a band who’s long understood how to embrace their influence on younger generations without abandoning their roots, as Deftones should know. The Cure have taken them under their wings on multiple occasions, and Deftones were one of the bands who helped celebrate The Cure’s influence on MTV Icon in 2004 (alongside AFI, blink-182, and Razorlight), the same year The Cure tapped nu metal/post-hardcore studio wizard Ross Robinson for their self-titled album.
Like Ohms, Private Music comes at a time in which Deftones’ influence has extended outside of metal and into post-hardcore, metalcore, indie rock, electronic music, grungy alternative rock, and most notably, shoegaze. And in the time since Ohms‘ release, the interest in shoegaze and the acknowledgement of Deftones’ influence on the genre’s new wave (after they themselves were influenced by the genre’s pioneers) has only grown. With Private Music, Deftones haven’t gone and made a full-on shoegaze album or anything, but they’ve absolutely made an album that meets the moment, an album that fits right in with the modern world of guitar-driven rock music that they themselves have helped shape over the course of the last 30 years. If you didn’t know any better, you could mistake it for one of the many Deftones-inspired bands that have been on the rise these past few years, but it also reminds you that there’s nothing like the real thing. And if you’re a longtime Deftones fan who doesn’t care about their impact on TikTok crazes, the new school of shoegaze, or new music in general, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed either.
Ohms was the first Deftones album in 17 years to be produced by their once-frequent collaborator Terry Date, while Private Music reunites them with another producer who’s becoming an increasingly important part of the Deftones story, Nick Raskulinecz. Nick helmed 2010’s Diamond Eyes and 2012’s Koi No Yokan (and more recently worked with past Deftones tourmates Code Orange), and he knows how to capture Deftones at their most simultaneously beautiful and aggressive. Private Music is no exception; it sounds massive, immaculate, and modern. The few aspects of Deftones’ nu metal-era days that sound a little outdated now (and if we’re being honest, there are some) are nowhere to be found, nor are any sloppy attempts to modernize. (I’m sure we can all think of a handful of Deftones’ peers that we can’t say the same about.) Instead, we get the most natural version of what we could imagine a Deftones album in 2025 sounding like. It hits with the same towering attack that Deftones had when they opened this year’s MSG show with the one-two punch of 1997’s “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” and “My Own Summer (Shove It),” and I can already picture how natural it’s gonna sound when they start busting out Private Music singles “My Mind Is A Mountain” and “Milk of the Madonna” at upcoming shows. Both are certified bangers.
As Deftones have done since at least White Pony, Private Music subtly weaves together a melting pot of styles and influences so seamlessly that the end result just sounds like Deftones being Deftones. “Infinite Source” is one of the most well-executed fusions of dream pop and metal that you’ll hear this year. “Souvenir” will have you thinking Deftones have gone full indie pop until Stephen Carpenter’s titanic riffs prove otherwise. One of the album’s biggest standouts, “I Think About You All The Time,” is a soaring alternative rock power ballad with wall-of-sound electric guitars and an underlying acoustic that sounds straight out of the house that Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness built–a reminder of why it made so much sense when Chino Moreno joined The Smashing Pumpkins on stage at least twice in recent memory. And at the start of album closer “Departing the Body,” Chino adopts a gothy baritone that you could blink and mistake for Nick Cave or Leonard Cohen. Some parts of Private Music hardly pass as metal at all, and on the other side of the spectrum is “Cut Hands.” From its groove-based riffs to Chino’s sorta-rapped delivery, it might be their most overtly nu metal song in years.
More often than not, Private Music walks the line between atmospheric beauty and gut-punching heaviosity so gracefully that it’s just both at once. The two singles did a fine job of setting the stage for this album, which is largely an album of airy bangers like those songs and classics like “Change (In the House of Flies)” and the aforementioned “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away).” It’s an album that reinforces Deftones’ status as both influential veterans and a current force. It feels like an album that every type of Deftones fan can agree on; whether you found this band on TikTok or Headbangers Ball, the second we hear those crashes at the start of “My Mind Is A Mountain,” we’re all one and the same.